La Vie en Rose (2007) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error La Vie en Rose ( 2007 ) La môme (original title) Biopic of the iconic French singer Édith Piaf . Raised by her grandmother in a brothel, she was discovered while singing on a street corner at the age of 19. Despite her success, Piaf's life was filled with tragedy.

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Director: Phyllida Lloyd A widower is determined to get to the bottom of a potentially explosive secret involving his wife's murder, big business, and corporate corruption. Director: Fernando Meirelles Edit Storyline An un-chronological look at the life of the Little Sparrow, Édith Piaf (1915-1963). Her mother is an alcoholic street singer, her father a circus performer, her paternal grandmother a madam. During childhood she lives with each of them. At 20, she's a street singer discovered by a club owner who's soon murdered, coached by a musician who brings her to concert halls, and then quickly famous. Constant companions are alcohol and heartache. The tragedies of her love affair with Marcel Cerdan and the death of her only child belie the words of one of her signature songs, "Non, je ne regrette rien." The back and forth nature of the narrative suggests the patterns of memory and association.

Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com> The extraordinary life of Edith Piaf See more » Genres: Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, sexual content, brief nudity, language and thematic elements | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 20 July 2007 (USA) See more » Also Known As: La Vie en Rose See more » Filming Locations: $179,848 (USA) (8 June 2007) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia When Marion Cotillard introduced the song "Everything is Awesome" from The Lego Movie (2014) at the 87th Academy Awards in 2015, Édith Piaf 's song, "La vie en Rose" was playing in the background when she took the stage. See more » Goofs The caption that opens the Édith/Marcel Cerdan portion, which includes his fight, says "1947". Cerdan fought Tony Zale on 21 September 1948.

See more » Quotes Marion is spectacular but the film is needlessly melodramatic 18 May 2007 | by Maciste_Brother (the rock) – See all my reviews I'm glad I went to see LA MOME, or LA VIE EN ROSE. I had a good time at the movies. After seeing it, I realized what a good life I have. But seriously, Marion Cotillard's performance is nothing short of spectacular, even if her performance borders on caricature. I realized that whatever Cotillard and the director were attempting to do, it was worth it and that includes the borderline caricatural acting. The only thing I thought went overboard was the melodrama. Edith Piaf's life is filled with tragedy. We are well aware of this but the filmmaker didn't need to dwell on it ad nauseam. Practically every scene in LA VIE EN ROSE is taken from the big book of melodrama. It's hard to believe Edith didn't have one happy moment during her days as either a kid or a young adult. After 45 minutes of non-stop sadness, the film was laying it pretty thick.

The best example of this was when Edith and her friend were eating at a restaurant. It was the first time we saw Edith eating a meal in a restaurant as a young woman. Just showing her enjoying her meal and chatting with her friend would have been fun to see but then Edith's estranged mother walks in, begging for food and money from her daughter and well, here we go again, more melodrama. The film needed more quiet moments to balance out Edith's albeit tragic life. The constant melo was at times off putting. Edith's life is remarkable enough without having to rely on easy melodrama to tell it. The end effect was like the director wanted to impress younger generations, who are unfamiliar with Edith, by showing her life as being more edgy than Courtney Love's life could ever be. At the theater where I saw it, an old couple in front of me walked out halfway into the picture, visibly not pleased with the bleak representation of the beloved chanteuse. The director was obviously in love with the concept that great art emerges from tragedy/pain/suffering but he carried this concept to an unfortunate level. My other critique of LA VIE EN ROSE is that the script forgot major aspects about her life.

Of course they couldn't cover every aspect of her legendary life but forgetting to mention that Edith was the one who discovered Yves Montand or that she played a major part of the French Resistance was inexcusable. I understand that they wanted to create a specific portrait of her life. Making a biography is not easy thing to do. It can easily fall into two categories: it can be an exact "academic" portrayal of her life, which many find tedious and dull or it could have been a wildly inaccurate portrayal, made with many dramatic licenses, in order to be more entertaining. But in either case, an accurate, truthful portrayal of anyone's life is an impossibility and the director of LA VIE EN ROSE is conscious of this and deliberately avoided some things about Edith which would have conflicted with this portrait he wanted to create but the fact that Yves Montand didn't even figure somewhere in this portrait was, imo, very bizarre. This brings another point: the film is so focused on Edith that all other characters are pushed in the background and we hardly know who they are. Edith's star is so bright that she eclipses everyone around her.

This part didn't bother me that much because I realized the director wanted to focus only on Edith but it would have been nice to have known who was who. But even with these weak points, I still recommend LA VIE EN ROSE. It's the type of film we rarely see these days: big, showy and remarkably depressing. Marion Cotillard should win awards after awards for her stunning portrayal. It's truly something to witness and it's worth the price of admission. And the music, of course, is great. 93 of 144 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes La Vie en Rose Movie Review & Film Summary (2007) | Roger Ebert Tweet She was the daughter of a street singer and a circus acrobat. She was dumped by her mother with her father, who dumped her with his mother, who ran a brothel. In childhood, diseases rendered her temporarily blind and deaf. She claimed she was cured by St. Therese, whose shrine the prostitutes took her to. One of the prostitutes adopted her, until her father returned, snatched her away, and put her to work in his act.

From her mother and the prostitute she heard many songs, and one day when his sidewalk act was doing badly, her father commanded her, "Do something." She sang "La Marseilles." And Edith Piaf was born. Advertisement Piaf. The French word for "sparrow." She was named by her first impresario, Louis Leplee. He was found shot dead not long after -- possibly by a pimp who considered her his property. She stood 4 feet, 8 inches tall, and so became "the Little Sparrow." She was the most famous and beloved French singer of her time -- of the century, in fact -- and her lovers included Yves Montand (who she discovered) and the middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan. She drank too much, all the time. She became addicted to morphine, and required ten injections a day. She grew old and prematurely stooped, and died at 47. Olivier Dahan's "La Vie en Rose," one of the best biopics I've seen, tells Piaf's life story through the extraordinary performance of Marion Cotillard , who looks like the singer.

The title, which translates loosely as "life through rose-colored glasses," is from one of Piaf's most famous songs, which she wrote herself. She is known for countless other songs perhaps most poignantly for "Non je ne regrette rien" ("No, I regret nothing"), which is seen in the film as her final song; if it wasn't, it should have been. How do you tell a life story to chaotic, jumbled and open to chance as Piaf's? Her life did not have an arc but a trajectory. Joy and tragedy seemed simultaneous. Her loves were heartfelt but doomed; after she begged the boxer Cerdan to fly to her in New York, he was killed in the crash of his flight from Paris. Her stage triumphs alternated with her stage collapses. If her life resembled in some ways Judy Garland's, there is this difference: Garland lived for the adulation of the audience, and Piaf lived to do her duty as a singer. From her earliest days, from the prostitutes, her father and her managers, she learned that when you're paid, you perform. Advertisement Oh, but what a performer she was. Her voice was loud and clear, reflecting her early years as a street singer.

Such a big voice for such a little woman. At first she sang mechanically, but was tutored to improve her diction and express the meaning of her words. She did that so well that if you know what the words "Non je ne regrette rien" mean, you can essentially feel the meaning of every other word in the song. Dahan and his co-writer, Isabelle Sobelman , move freely through the pages of Piaf's life. A chronology would have missed the point. She didn't start here and go there; she was always, at every age, even before she had the name, the little sparrow. The action moves back and forth from childhood to final illness, from applause to desperation, from joy to heartbreak (particularly in the handling of Cerdan's last visit to her). This mosaic storytelling style has been criticized in some quarters as obscuring facts (quick: how many times was she married?). But think of it this way: Since there are, in fact, no wedding scenes in the movie, isn't it more accurate to see husbands, lovers, friends, admirers, employees and everyone else as whirling around her small, still center?

Nothing in her early life taught her to count on permanence or loyalty. What she counted on was singing, champagne, infatuation and morphine. Advertisement Many biopics break down in depicting their subjects in old age, and Piaf, at 47, looked old. Gene Siskel once referred to an actor's old-age makeup as making him look like a turtle. In "La Vie en Rose" there is never a moment's doubt. Even the hair is right; her frizzled, dyed, thinning hair in the final scenes matches the real Piaf in the videos I cite below. The only detail I can question is her resiliency after all-night drinking sessions. I once knew an alcoholic who said, "If I wasn't a drinker and I woke up with one of these hangovers, I'd check myself into the emergency room." Then there are the songs, a lot of them. I gather from the credits that some are dubbed by other singers, some are sung by Piaf herself, and some, in parts at least, by Cotillard. In the video clips you can see how Piaf choreographed her hands and fingers, and Cotillard has that right, too.

If a singer has been dead 50 years and sang in another language, she must have been pretty great to make it onto so many saloon jukeboxes, which is how I first heard her. Now, of course, she's on my iPod, and I'm listening to her right now. Pour moi toute seule. La Vie en Rose Édith Piaf - Film - Review - The New York Times The New York Times Movies |A French Songbird’s Life, in Chronological Disorder Search Movies | Movie Review | 'La Vie en Rose' A French Songbird’s Life, in Chronological Disorder La Vie En Rose Continue reading the main story As if acknowledging the challenges it faces in finding an American audience, “La Vie en Rose,” Olivier Dahan’s long, feverish film biography of Édith Piaf , notes that its heroine, an incomparably bright star in the French cultural firmament, never quite caught on over here. After a less than rapturous stateside reception, the film’s Piaf (played by Marion Cotillard) observes that Americans just don’t get her, and though she seems to have a good time in New York and California, the incomprehension appears to have been mutual.

She won’t even try a corned beef sandwich at a Manhattan delicatessen. But Mr. Dahan’s film goes some way toward bridging the gap. This is not because it explains Piaf’s appeal — though it does offer viewers a chance to sample the glories of her voice — but rather because it assimilates her life neatly into the conventions of the musical biopic. It turns out that we Americans don’t have a monopoly on singers and composers who emerge from traumatic childhoods, battle drug addiction, pursue difficult love affairs and win the hearts of millions. It also turns out that, while musical idioms sometimes have a hard time crossing the barriers of language and culture, certain narrative clichés are universal. So if you have seen “Ray” or “Walk the Line,” you will hardly require a summary of “La Vie en Rose,” which flings its subject back and forth in time, simultaneously charting her rise from the tough streets of Paris and her decline into drug abuse and ill health. There are tearful confrontations, moments of bliss and betrayal, tantrums and onstage collapses, love affairs and business deals, all of it punctuated by the big, expressive, unmistakable singing of Piaf herself, as Ms.

Cotillard, wide-eyed and fine-boned, lip-syncs along. The celebrity biopic is decidedly an actor’s genre. The number of great movies made out of great artists’ lives is tiny, especially in proportion to the number of supposedly great performances these movies have occasioned. In this kind of picture the story, the production design and the mise-en-scène need only provide adequate scaffolding for a heroically superfluous act of impersonation. Advertisement Continue reading the main story No one else could possibly be Édith Piaf, or Johnny Cash or Ray Charles (or Truman Capote or Muhammad Ali or anyone else on the ever-growing list). Their larger-than-life self-sufficiency adds a thrilling element of risk to the task of portraying any of them on film. Or so it would seem. Really, though, the audacity involved in taking up such a challenge predisposes audiences (and critics) to applause, as does the durable popularity of the originals. So it is hard not to admire Ms. Cotillard for the discipline and ferocity she brings to the role. But it is equally hard to be completely swept up in Mr. Dahan’s dutiful, functional and ultimately superficial film.

Continue reading the main story “La Vie en Rose,” which Mr. Dahan wrote as well as directed, has an intricate structure, which is a polite way of saying that it’s a complete mess. Resisting the habit of starting at the end and flashing back to the beginning, it begins at the late middle, goes back to the beginning, comes back to the near-end, jumps around in the early and middle middle and then noodles around between a bunch of almost-ends and the really absolutely final end, with a quick, baffling detour into an earlier part of the early middle. Clear enough? Photo Marion Cotillard plays Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose." Credit Bruno Calvo/Picturehouse The main casualty of this willy-nilly narration is any coherent sense of Piaf’s personality. It may be that Mr. Dahan and his collaborators did not want to subject their heroine to the indignity of psychological explanation, preferring to let her charisma rule the screen without qualification or compromise. And it is true that Ms. Cotillard is a dynamic, quick-witted performer, one whose sheer force of will goes some way toward showing how a funny-looking, abrasive street urchin could become the idol of postwar France.

But not quite far enough. Who was Piaf? The miserable childhood, with its saving moments of tenderness, is duly noted. Papa was a circus contortionist, Mama was a hopeless drunk, and little Édith lived for a while in Grandma’s brothel, where she was befriended by a soulful prostitute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) and where she was briefly blinded by keratitis. Later Édith and her best pal, Momone (Sylvie Testud), sing on the streets of Paris — actually Momone makes faces and swigs wine while Édith belts out the songs — where Édith is discovered by a nightclub impresario (Gérard Depardieu). He gives her a stage name. (Piaf means “sparrow.”) She is a hit. He is murdered. She is a suspect. What really happened? We don’t know, but in any case she soon moves on to a new mentor, and then to a love affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). Also at least one marriage, several car accidents and one brilliantly shot sequence, by far the best in the movie, in which she learns of a lover’s death.

Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy To help us sort though it all, dates appear at the bottom of the screen. Oddly, the years of the Second World War are left out, an omission that seems puzzling given that Piaf is known to have aided the Resistance during the Nazi occupation (even as she continued to perform). But many of Mr. Dahan’s dramatic choices are puzzling, and his breathless camera movements seem driven more by desperation than by enthusiasm. In the end, as often happens in movies of this kind, “La Vie en Rose” is saved by Piaf herself. Most of the songs in the film are accompanied by subtitles. (An exception is “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” the signature of her last years.) They are hardly necessary, given the undiminished power of that voice. Unfortunately the movie isn’t either. “La Vie en Rose” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has subtitled swearing, drug use and some sexual references. LA VIE EN ROSE Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Written (in French, with English subtitles) and directed by Olivier Dahan; director of photography, Tetsuo Nagata; edited by Richard Marizy; music by Christopher Gunning; production designer, Olivier Raoux; produced by Alain Goldman; released by Picturehouse. Running time: 140 minutes. WITH: Marion Cotillard ( Édith Piaf ), Sylvie Testud (Momone), Pascal Greggory (Louis Barrier), Emmanuelle Seigner (Titine), Jean-Paul Rouve (Louis Gassion), Clotilde Courau (Anetta), Jean-Pierre Martins (Marcel Cerdan), Catherine Allegret (Louise), Marc Barbe (Raymond Asso) and Gérard Depardieu (Louis Leplée). La Vie En Rose Good lead performance in a very average bio pic. Tsubaki Sanjuro Super Reviewer La Vie En Rose is an incredible biopic on famed French singer Edith Piaf. Brilliantly acted and directed, Edith Piaf is wonderfully portrayed by actress Marion Cotillard who delivers the greatest performance of her career.

La Vie En Rose is a phenomenal drama film, and it portrays the struggles and sadness of singer Edith Piaf perfectly. An incredible film that is brilliantly acted, directed and above all, told is captured on film. The result is a flawless film that depicts a sad individual. Edith Piaf led a turmoiled life, and every bit of it is brilliantly captured on film. The result is quite possibly the greatest biopic ever filmed. Marion Cotillard is the perfect choice to play Edith Piaf, and she really looks the part. I think she definitely deserved the Oscar for her performance. The rest of the cast do a terrific job as well, and each of them brings something truly wonderful to this already impressive work. La Vie En Rose is a phenomenal portrait of a singer who led a melancholic lifestyle. A superb film in every respect, La Vie En Rose is one of the essential biopics and not since Clint Eastwood's Bird has a picture been this vivid in showing the conflicted and troubled side of famed artist. This is a powerful film, and one that you won't easily forget. You'll come to understand Edith Piaf and her struggles, but you'll also admire her gifts.

A beautiful and stunning film. Alex roy Super Reviewer ½ I watched this movie because of the lead actresss Academy Award. She turned in a tremendous performance. There are many good scenes, and it is helped immensely by the lead actress, Marion Cotillard, who gives an appropriately beautiful, ugly, bold and brave performance as the doomed singer. The singing is dubbed by the real Piaf recordings, and the lip-syncing is very well done. As someone that didnt know anything about the real life history of Edith Piaf, I found the movie somewhat disjointed - hopping around chronologically made it more of a challenge to understand events. But, all in all, a nice movie. Cynthia S. Watch La Vie en Rose Online | 2007 Movie | Yidio Watch La Vie en Rose "The Extraordinary Story of Edith Piaf" La Vie en rose is a biographical movie about French singer Edith Piaf. Co-written and directed by Olivier Dahan, the film was written by Isabelle Sobelman and Olivier Dahan, who also directed the film. Starring Marion Cotillard, the film also features Pascal Greggory, Sylvie Testud and G�rard Depardieu.

The movie begins in 1918 in Paris when Edith is a small child. She is crying on the stairs after she is teased by children in the streets. Her mother is singing and begging for change across the street. Then she writes to Edith's father, an acrobat, who is in World War I fighting in a battlefield. She lets him know that she will be leaving Edith with her mother in order to pursue life as an artist. When her father returns, he takes a sickly Edith to live with his mother, a bordello madam. Edith is now surrounded by prostitution but taken under the wings of the women there. Though she is cared for, she becomes blind until the age of 7. Her father returns years later and takes Edith on the road as he works in the circus. While cleaning up after dinner, Edith sees the apparition of St. Therese in flames, assured that she will always be protected. When Edith turns nine, her father, after an argument, leaves the circus and performs on the streets of Paris. Edith holds a hat for coins during his lackluster performances.

When a passerby asks if she is in the show, she begins to sing "La Marseillaise" and manages to move the crowd with her raw emotion. Years later, Edith sings on the streets until nightclub owner Louis Leplee (played by Gerard Depardieu) pursues her to perform an audition at his club. He hires her after assigning her a new last name for the stage La Vie en Rose review | The List comments (12A) 140min French singer Edith Piaf’s real life was the stuff of turbulent melodrama: she was abandoned by her mother and spent some of her impoverished childhood in a brothel, and she was discovered singing on the streets by an impresario, whom she was later accused of murdering. And despite winning the affection of millions through her heartfelt songs, the diminutive Piaf endured a series of failed love affairs and became addicted to painkillers following a car crash. By the age of just 47, suffering from crippling arthritis, she died of cancer.

Director Olivier Dahan heeds Jean-Luc Godard’s advice that ‘a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order’, by scrambling the film’s chronology. His highly stylised film ricochets between different time periods, jumping from late 1950s New York, to post-WWI Paris, from mid-1950s to the early 60s south of France. The scenes are brief, and often overwrought and without prior knowledge of Piaf, it’s sometimes hard to grasp the significance of what you’re seeing. Supporting actors such as Pascal Greggory as her long-suffering manager Louis Barrier, Gerard Depardieu as her first patron Louis Leplee, and Jean-Pierre Martins as the boxer Marcel Cerdan - supposedly the love of her life - make little impression. Puzzlingly, despite a near two-and-a-half hour running time, there’s no mention of Piaf’s activities during the Occupation, where she played for German officers and apparently assisted the Resistance. The film is worth seeing however for Cotillard’s magnificent central performance.

It’s not just her impressive physical transformation into her character, it’s the way she conveys Piaf’s all-or-nothing personality: this is a woman of strength and fragility, capable of treating her confidants with cruelty. And the chansons themselves, convincingly lip-synched by Cotillard, continue to electrify, with Dahan wisely leaving the very best - ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ (‘No Regrets’) til last. (Tom Dawson) Written by: Isabelle Sobelman, Olivier Dahan Cast: Marion Cotillard, Gérard Depardieu, Sylvie Testud This highly stylised film ricochets between different time periods of French singer Edith Piaf's (Cottilard) turbulent life. The brief and often overwrought scenes are sometimes hard to grasp without prior knowledge of Piaf, but Cotillard's central lip-synching performance is magnificent.

Édith Piaf’s life in La Vie en Rose: a modern biopic - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Édith Piaf’s life in La Vie en Rose: a modern biopic By David Walsh 29 June 2007 La Vie en Rose, directed by Olivier Dahan, written by Dahan and Isabelle Sobelman Understandably there is both widespread curiosity about the lives of well-known people, including the admirable and the less than admirable, and the desire among artists to produce something that might satisfy the public’s (and their own) curiosity. This inquisitiveness has its healthy and less than healthy aspects. It is certainly natural to want to know, in the case of an individual one admires greatly, about the source of his or her gifts or even genius. Certain figures continue to generate apparently inexhaustible interest—Shakespeare, Mozart, Lincoln and others. New books appear each year on the subject of such lives. On the other hand, we live at a time of diminished opportunities for masses of people. The possibility of their leading fulfilling or semi-fulfilling lives is dwindling.

A vast, unprecedented social and financial gap has opened up between “ordinary” people and “celebrities.” (See, for example, a film like Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist (1953), in which Edmond O’Brien and Lupino meet on a bus tour of film stars’ homes in Beverly Hills. The homes are large and well-appointed, but they are houses on a street, without high walls, gates or guard dogs.) A sometimes morbid fascination has developed, cultivated by the mass media, in the doings of the rich and famous; this fascination, as we have noted before, may contain explosive dosages of envy and resentment. A film biography is a very difficult thing to do well. A single real life is a very uneven affair. It rarely divides itself into neat portions. Its “secret” may only be revealed by its totality, without any particular moment disclosing some essential truth. After all, fiction exists for a reason. In fiction the artist rearranges, maximizes, condenses “real life” so that the latter’s more profound truths may emerge.

During Hollywood’s heyday, the disparate and contradictory facts of various complex lives were all poured into a giant machine, hand-operated by executives, producers, writers and directors (many of them talented), and came out as a more or less homogenous paste, to be applied evenly on the screen in the form of the ‘biopic.’ The film industry’s concept of ‘artistic license’ was elastic and expansive. The lives of General George Custer, Emile Zola, Madame Curie, Frederic Chopin, Thomas Edison, the Brontë sisters, Franz Liszt, Abraham Lincoln, Lou Gehrig, Marie Antoinette and many, many others were tossed into the mix, seriously ‘reworked’ (if not simply replaced with more attractive cinematic versions) and made to conform more often than not to certain predetermined and well-defined themes. It must be said that an attempt was made to give some general notion of the historical situation in which the given protagonists found themselves and that the themes were usually of a liberal, humanist variety: the need to vanquish backwardness and prejudice, the importance of individuals standing up to tyrannical authority, the value of perseverance and sacrifice in the name of art or science, etc.

Today’s film biographers concentrate almost exclusively on the individual situation. Film directors, along with production and costume designers, art directors, set decorators and make-up artists, go to considerable lengths to reproduce particular “period” details with accuracy. For all intents and purposes, the overall artistic effort often begins and ends with such details. Hardly anyone attempts broad historical or social generalizations. In the new biographical works, writers and directors search out and bring to the fore the personal weaknesses and vices that yesterday’s filmmakers (and studios) tried so energetically to conceal. Is this an exercise in increased realism or cynicism? Probably some combination of the two. The modern ‘biopic’ is more revealing, more vulgar, often more brutal. It has been produced by new conditions and new moods bound up with those new conditions. Is it an improvement? Yes and no. Certainly no one wants a return to the day when a Cole Porter, for example, could be portrayed so dishonestly. The present situation, however, is not satisfying either. French filmmaker Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose (La Môme) follows the short, unhappy life of French popular singer Édith Piaf, who rose from the streets of Paris to international fame.

Piaf was born Édith Giovanna Gassion in 1915, in the midst of World War I, to a part-Italian mother, who was a street singer and a terrible alcoholic, and an acrobat father. Abandoned by her parents, the girl, a sickly child, lived briefly with her maternal grandmother, a Kabyle (the Algerian Berber minority), and for a longer period of time with her paternal grandmother, a brothel-keeper in Normandy. She was discovered as a teenager singing in the streets of Paris in 1935 by nightclub owner Louis Leplée; he nicknamed her La Môme Piaf (The Sparrow Kid)—she was tiny, 4 foot 8. Not long after he introduced Piaf to Parisian audiences, Leplée was murdered and the singer’s underworld acquaintances came under suspicion. Piaf enjoyed great success from the late 1930s onward. During the war she continued to perform, including for audiences of high-ranking Germans, but her exploits on behalf of the anti-Nazi Resistance are now recognized. In 1944 she took up with and mentored the career of newcomer Yves Montand.

The latter, along with his brother, was a militant Communist Party member. Piaf’s great love, by all accounts, was boxer Marcel Cerdan, who died in an airplane crash in 1949. The singer remained popular throughout the 1950s, making a number of visits to the US, where she appeared on television, but she was now addicted to morphine and continued to drink excessively. She died from cancer at 47 in 1963. Dahan’s film covers most of these episodes, with the glaring omission of the war years. His Piaf (Marion Cotillard) is small, anxious and talented, bearing the scars of her childhood spent in brutal and chaotic conditions. Dahan invents a prostitute who looks after Édith and is inconsolable when her father comes back for the little girl. He has her father, performing as a contortionist on the street, push the girl forward during a lull in his act and tell her to ‘Do something.’ She sings the Marseillaise, winning the crowd’s approval. A career begins. Piaf starts singing in dives, sharing her earnings with a lowlife.

Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) discovers her and, almost in passing, is soon found murdered. The film jumps around, from the end of her life to the beginning, then to the middle, and back again. The individual moments are clear enough, but the reason for the scrambling is not. Piaf, in the film, is nearly always drunk or miserable, or both—the only exception being the brief period of her affair with Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). That may very well be an accurate representation of her life, although the dramatic effect is wearing. Certainly she was one of those performers from a poverty-stricken background who was unable for any length of time to put the misery behind her. One thinks of singers like Billie Holiday (born the same year as Piaf, whom the latter admired greatly) and, from an entirely different musical genre, country music performer Hank Williams. If Chet Flippo’s unflattering and rather repetitive biography (Your Cheatin’ Heart) is to be believed, Williams hardly experienced a single sober or contented day of his adult life, before dying at 29. Performers like this are martyrs to their own severely damaged early lives, the product of social oppression.

And not every film or singing ‘star’ from a poor background, and they are not perhaps the worst of their breed, ever adjusts to adulation and wealth. For some it’s disorienting, even unreal and psychologically destabilizing, to move from deprived conditions into a world of privilege on the basis of one’s voice or one’s looks. There must be highly conflicting emotions—pangs of guilt about those left behind, resentment against those who have suddenly ‘discovered’ you, suspicion about the motives of those who are prospering as a result of your efforts, a sense of unworthiness, anxiety about the future, a terror of returning to the early conditions of life and so on. (Flippo writes, for example, that Williams “never believed he had earned the astonishing success that was his; he felt success had been forced upon him, a bitter pill to be choked down daily.”) And they are also martyrs to the emotions they transmit. A critic writes disapprovingly about Piaf and other singers who “wear their hearts on their sleeves.” That’s a bit too easy. Those emotions were not only hers. She was as much their victim as anything else. One can communicate popular moods too directly.

Fans, unhappy in their own skins, unclear about the source of their discontent, look upon you as their voice, perhaps their savior. Insatiable, they can make terrible demands, and a performer may, tragically, attempt to meet all those demands, an impossible task. Dahan’s film is intense and holds one’s attention for the most part. Cotillard provides a tour de force performance, based on a serious study of Piaf’s life, her voice and movements. The director told an interviewer: “I didn’t want to make a biopic. I wanted to make a portrait so I read every book, every biography, I’ve met a lot of people, but my only wish was to make something true and honest about her.” He is no doubt sincere, but sincerity doesn’t solve every artistic problem. La Vie en Rose stumbles over a number of things. The scenes of street and bar life in Paris in the 1930s are somewhat stereotyped, all working class drinking and cursing without let-up. Édith and her friend Mômone (Sylvie Testud) take part in the goings-on.

In Édith’s one encounter with her mother, the latter asks her daughter for a hand-out and the singer curses her and tells her to get lost. In the fashion of the modern biopic, Dahan leaves none of Piaf’s vulgarity or emotional cruelty out of the picture. Why should he?—but the film, at times, has something of a one-note quality. As Piaf becomes a success, the film’s scope narrows, becoming almost claustrophobic. We witness Piaf and her torments, and her torments of others, exclusively. This raises a more substantial difficulty. Some inner accord must exist between major figures in whatever field and the great collisions or dilemmas of their eras, or else why would they have risen to prominence? A singer is not just a voice, even a great voice, but a human being singing about human problems and communicating to others. The form and content of that communication has a socially significant character. After establishing Piaf’s childhood poverty and traumas, the filmmaker essentially sets her loose from social and historical connections as though “all that” were a settled issue. But other things happened in the twentieth century and some of them must have affected Piaf as well.

What at first appears remarkable and almost incomprehensible—the complete absence of the years 1940-47—has a certain logic to it. Dahan has his Piaf emerge fully formed from childhood and, as far as he’s concerned, external events have no more to say in the matter. Apparently the singer played a role in assisting the underground during World War II. For example, she posed with French prisoners of war as a supposedly morale-boosting effort, but turned the photographs over to members of the Resistance, who made false passports for the prisoners. She later brought the passports to the prison camp, helping some of the detainees to escape. It seems unlikely that Montand, a determined leftist at the time, would have begun a relationship in 1944 with anyone not identified with opposition to the German occupation. Piaf rose to prominence during the general period of the Popular Front government and the general strike of 1936, when the French working class, only held back by its official leadership, threatened to overthrow the existing order. Is there any connection between the sudden appearance and stardom of a ‘street kid’ in Paris nightclubs and the larger events?

The filmmaker is not obliged to include any particular detail in his work, that’s hardly the point, but he surely ought to be striving to make the most sense possible of his subject’s life and career. Detaching Piaf’s wildly contradictory life from the larger realities of French social life weakens the film and makes her own behavior somewhat arbitrary. Deprived of the organic intensity that might flow from a more balanced, broader, objective view of things, the filmmaker and the heavily burdened performer are reduced to the tour de force, i.e., generating an artificial intensity. One is gripped by the performance, but not left with all that much in the end. Amazon.com: La Vie en Rose: Marion Cotillard, Emmanuelle Seigner, Jean-Paul Rouve, Gerard Depardieu: Amazon Digital Services LLC HALL OF FAME TOP 1000 REVIEWER on September 12, 2007 Format: DVD Don't plan to see this film and then go out for a lively night on the town.

You will be so spent after the one hundred forty-one minutes of this gut-wrenching film that when the lights come on at the end, you'll need a minute to figure out where you are, and then additional downtime to process all you've seen. Days later, you'll still be thinking about this slice of life--and Edith Piaf. Piaf's story is well known to her long-time fans--brought up in a brothel, wrested from the only life she knew by her father so they could join the circus, her teen years on the streets, her "rescue" by a crime figure who gave her the start to her career, and, ultimately, her international success and final illness. She was always frail, sickly, malnourished, and wildly temperamental. She was often on drugs or alcohol, and she was always in search of true love (not finding it till late in her life). All this is depicted here with its horrors and its rare moments of tenderness, the cinematography (Tetsuo Nagata) so brilliant that the realistic, dark settings invite the reader's emotional entry into them and exploration of them.

Marion Cotillard becomes Piaf, a physical likeness that is uncanny in its realism (one wonders if she can ever play another part without conjuring up Piaf's image), and her emotional connection to Piaf's music is total. Her song performances are absolutely flawless, as are her gestures, and the only clue that she is lip-synching is the unmistakable Piaf voice the emerges from her mouth. Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu) as the nightclub owner whose murder by organized crime draws Edith in for questioning, shows the genuine care he has for Edith and the tough face of a man who has seen and done it all. Read more › Marion Cotillard - Bio, Facts, Family | Famous Birthdays Marion Cotillard Actress Born In France#4 About French actress who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as singer Edith Piaf in the 2007 film La Vie en Rose. She has also played prominent roles in the films Big Fish, Public Enemies, Midnight in Paris, Contagion, Inception, Rust and Bone and The Dark Knight Rises. Before Fame She began her acting career in theater and on TV.

In the mid-90's, she made appearances in the French films La Belle Verte and My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument. Trivia She made a cameo as a news anchor in the 2013 comedy Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. Family Life In 2007, she began a relationship with French actor Guillaume Canet . Together they welcomed a son, Marcel, in 2011. She is currently pregnant with their second child.

Question: Who played Edith Piaf in the 2007 film 'La Vie En Rose'?
Answer: Marion Cotillard